Episode 181 - "Epicurus And His Philosophy" Part 33 - Chapter 14 - The New Virtues 04
Date: 07/06/23
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/3149-episode-181-epicurus-and-his-philosophy-part-33-chapter-14-the-new-virtues-01/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 181 opens Chapter 14, “The New Virtues,” with all four regular speakers — Cassius, Joshua, Don, Martin (nothing to contribute), and Callistheni. DeWitt’s chapter covers Epicurus’s transformation of the four classical virtues — wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice — from political ideals about citizenship into instruments of the individual’s pursuit of pleasure. Cassius opens by contrasting the political focus of Plato and Aristotle (virtues as civic excellence) with Epicurus’s individual focus (virtues as means to a happy life), and invites Don to explain aretē, the Greek word usually translated as “virtue” — which actually means excellence, the characteristic performance of a thing at its best, with overtones of manliness, reputation, and prowess, and which carries none of the Victorian moral baggage of the English word “virtue.” Don notes that at least according to Aristotle, the virtues are learned through practice and always oriented toward what is good for the polis; for Epicurus by contrast, the virtues are instrumental to pleasure — not ends in themselves. Joshua traces the Latin root vir (man) to establish that the Roman virtus was essentially the proper behavior of good Roman men who put Rome’s interests before their own, exemplified by the story of Cincinnatus — called from his farm to become dictator, defeating the threat, then voluntarily returning to his farm before his term even expired. Joshua and Cassius connect this to the pattern of “exemplary men” — Hercules, Achilles, and so forth — as models of civic virtue that individuals were meant to emulate, a model that Marcus Brutus’s dying words (“O unhappy virtue, so you were just a word after all”) ultimately expose as an abstraction resting on nothing firm. Don quotes Aristotle from the Nicomachean Ethics — “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts; this is what distinguishes a good form of constitution from a bad one” — and Cassius identifies the circularity: who decides what acts are just? Don proposes Epicurus’s “neither harm nor be harmed” as at least a concrete, observable starting point. Cassius adds the Roman damnatio memoriae — the practice of erasing politically inconvenient emperors from all public monuments — as proof that virtue is highly malleable in authoritarian hands, citing Don’s earlier 1984 reference. DeWitt’s concept of “original honesty” is introduced: Epicurus looked to the young of all kinds of animals before they are corrupted by bad philosophy or religion to establish a natural norm — directly opposed to the Christian doctrine of original sin. Cassius calls this “the emperor has no clothes moment” for Epicurus, since by restoring virtue to its natural foundation he strips priests, oracles, philosophers, and rulers of their authority to define it. On “faith as a virtue,” Cassius clarifies that DeWitt means confidence based on evidence (dogmatism as the assertion of the possibility of knowledge, in contrast to Academic Skepticism), not blind faith — just as we live our lives with confidence that the floor will hold us rather than requiring proof at every step. Joshua solves a long-standing puzzle in DeWitt: the remark “unluckily not 39 authorized doctrines” is a reference to the 39 Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church (finalized 1571), meaning DeWitt would have liked the number to match for a parallel with Christianity. DeWitt p. 290 is read: “While the good Platonist like the Christian lived in contemplation of immortality, the Epicurean was taught to live in contemplation of mortality… great urgency upon the business of living rightly — procrastination became the greater folly.” Joshua calls this one of the most profound positions you can take: life is not a warm-up, not a dress rehearsal — “this is it.” The Wisdom section covers DeWitt’s contrast between Plato’s wisdom (pure reason contemplating absolute truth, linked to mathematics and dialectic) and Epicurus’s practical wisdom (phronēsis — the greatest good and the beginning of all the other virtues). Don identifies phronēsis as the basis for all choices and avoidances; Cassius notes it is Epicurus’s answer to “pure reason contemplating absolute truth.” Ayn Rand is mentioned as a modern example of the rationalist who makes reason the dividing feature of humanity, an error Epicurus rejected. The Platonic “noble lie” (Republic Book 3) — the claim that people are naturally divided into gold, silver, and iron persons, with gold persons having the divine right to rule — is discussed as the kind of aristocratic scheme that Epicurus overturns. Joshua applies his history background to note that pre-modern government always involved a tripartite struggle between king, aristocracy, and church. The Temperance section notes that the Latin temperare means “to restrain”; Cassius reads Torquatus’s discussion from De Finibus Book 1, Section 14 — temperance is desirable not for its own sake but because it produces greater pleasure; intemperance leads to serious consequences when short-term stimulation overwhelms judgment. The distinction between prudence/wisdom (knowing what to do) and temperance (actually carrying it through) is drawn from Torquatus’s “nor is it enough to judge what is right to do or leave undone — we also need to abide by our judgment.” DeWitt notes Epicurus does not even mention temperance in his extant writings but must have discussed it in his lost work On Choice and Avoidance. The Courage section covers Plato’s assignment of courage to the “passionate” part of the soul, Aristotle’s definition as a mean between fear and overconfidence (Don quotes the full Nicomachean Ethics passage and finds it “almost meaningless” in its circularity), and Epicurus’s view that there is no instance of an Epicurean refusing to bear arms because of his philosophy — illustrated by Cassius Longinus (Epicurean general). Joshua gives an extended reading of Thersites’s speech from Iliad Book 2 (the ugly, loudmouthed critic who accuses Agamemnon of fighting for personal gain after ten years of war) — presented as Homer’s vehicle for legitimate questions about the ends of military courage. The Croesus oracle story (“a great power will be destroyed” — which turned out to be Croesus himself) and Lucian’s Alexander the Oracle Monger (Marcus Aurelius throws lions in a river, loses the battle anyway) illustrate that courage without correct calculation of advantage is mere foolhardiness. DeWitt p. 293 is read: “nothing terrible can happen to one while living who has thoroughly grasped the truth that there is nothing terrible in not living.” The chapter’s key point is that Epicurus transfers responsibility for courage from the state and its laws to the individual, shifting emphasis from the political to the moral sphere. The episode closes with Cassius reading Torquatus’s summary from De Finibus Book 1: “Those who place the chief good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name… wisdom must be considered the art of living — if it affected no result it would not be desired, but as it is it is desired because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.” Next week: justice.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 181 of Lucretius Today. This week we’re starting a new chapter in DeWitt’s Epicurus and His Philosophy. We’re moving on to Chapter 14, which is entitled “The New Virtues.” This is the next-to-last chapter in the book, and in this section DeWitt singles out virtue and how Epicurus approaches the virtues as opposed to the way the Stoics or other philosophers approach it. DeWitt reminds us that there are basically four classical virtues that Plato and Aristotle and other Greeks had referred to on a general basis: wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. The point that DeWitt stresses in this opening section is the distinction between Epicurus’s more individual perspective on the virtues versus the more political focus that Aristotle and Plato were coming from — how the individual relates to the state, how he becomes a good citizen — and so the discussion of virtues was generally taking place in a different context before Epicurus, more related to becoming a good citizen than becoming a happy person. But before we get into that aspect of it, I prefer to drop back and discuss for a moment the word “virtue” itself. When we talk about this new perspective on the virtues, we’ve got to start with the question of: what is a virtue, and how do we know what a virtue is?
Don: Well, I think it might be helpful to think about the word that’s actually used in ancient Greek: aretē is the word usually translated as “virtue.” But the literal meaning is something more akin to excellence — the thing that best shows the character of something. Your aretē is the way that you express yourself in the best possible way. Other synonyms are things like character, reputation, virtue, and then of course things like manliness and prowess and generic goodness and excellence. So it’s a broad term, and I think whenever we get it translated as “virtue” we get a lot of almost Victorian baggage. It’s an exhibition of the excellence of whatever you’re doing — so the virtue of a spoon is that it can lift things out of a bowl, that sort of thing. There’s a lot more connotations to it than just what we think of as virtue.
Cassius: Is this just another way of getting back into the same question of whether things exist in an absolute Platonic ideal form versus just as a contextual combination of atoms? Because Don, when you say “excellence” or “the best” — best in relation to what? Excellent in relation to what? Is there a single absolute example of the best to which we can refer, especially in something as broad as a word like wisdom or courage or justice or temperance?
Don: Yeah, at least according to Aristotle, he definitely believed that the virtues were something you could learn, and it always seems to come back to the idea of what’s good for the polis — what’s good for the city-state. How do you show your excellence in relation to the city-state? And it always seems to come back to that idea for him. So I think that Epicurus comes at it from a more individualistic perspective, because for Epicurus the virtues are instrumental to pleasure, whereas for Plato and Aristotle these are things that can be examined in and of themselves. Do you have courage or not? Do you have wisdom or not? That is a system of study you can look at, whereas Epicurus is saying: well, the virtues are important, but they’re only important in that they are instrumental to a pleasant life.
Cassius: I think this is such an important way to introduce our discussion of the virtues that I really would like to get input from the rest of our panel. Joshua, Martin, Callistheni — let’s talk about this, because the way Don ended up right there, I think, is pretty much the way I see it myself. You have to decide what is your fixed point of reference before you can evaluate whether something is wise, temperate, courageous, just, honest, or anything else. But that seems to be something that people don’t talk about that much. They just presume that there’s some wisdom floating in the air, or courage floating in the air, or justice floating in the air, without reference to how they’re deciding whether it really has that quality or not.
Joshua: I think it’s helpful, Cassius, to look at the root of the word “virtue,” which Don hinted at. It’s this word for man — vir — and the idea is that the virtues are the behaviors that you are meant to imitate in good Roman men, I think, is the idea there. And to not follow these virtues would be to make you suspect, both as a Roman and as a man. So that’s the root of it — the proper behavior for good upstanding Roman men, the behavior of people who put the interests of Rome ahead of their own interests. And how you get that is partially from looking at the men around you, but part of it is the stories they would tell each other. There’s a story about a Roman hero called Cincinnatus — of course the city of Cincinnati is named after him. He was in politics but then had retired to his villa, his country estate, and taken up the life of simple farming. Then something happened — there was a threat affecting the city and they needed a really good strong leader to take care of the situation. So they sent messengers out to Cincinnatus’s farm. He sees them coming, he won’t talk to them immediately — he’s got to go back in the house and put on his toga and do the proper thing — and then he comes back out, accepts their invitation. Roman law had a provision that you could make one man a dictator for a period — I think it was one year or nine months. So he becomes a dictator under Roman law, drives the threat away, and then before his term is even up as a dictator he takes off the toga and goes back to his farm. And that’s the classic image. Throughout history, people like George Washington and their admirers have used that image. The main point comes from analyzing the stories not just of heroes but also of gods — people like Hercules — you’re meant to look at these people who are said to be the pattern of such-and-such a virtue, and to emulate that in yourself. That is the classical idea of virtue. And of course I think Don is completely right when it comes to the Epicureans: the virtues are instrumental and subservient to pleasure, and that would be the main difference.
Cassius: So Joshua, when you’re talking about Roman men doing things that are virtuous in the eyes of the Roman citizens — that’s an interesting way of looking at the fact that virtue, when you dig deeper into it, you come back with almost what I think Brutus said after he was defeated at Philippi: “I believed in you as if you were real, but in the end you’re just a mirage.” There doesn’t seem to be anything firm and solid if what you’re looking at is just taking a survey or a poll of what the most admired leaders of a particular civilization are doing. And yet when you read about virtue today on the internet, when you hear about what the Stoics are thinking about — especially modern Stoics — they throw out this word “virtue” as if it exists somehow, handed down by God. I’m reminded of a recent book out there by Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, called Manhood, based on this idea that there is some intrinsic virtue in being a man — and in this case he’s talking gender, but we’re also talking wider, just in being a human. There’s this whole idea of some kind of absolute form of virtue that everybody should aspire to, and that if we think about it hard enough, the definition is just somehow floating there in front of us. It seems to me they do use examples nowadays of virtue, but they’re talking and acting as if these examples themselves were just following some ideal that existed prior to them — and you’ve got sort of again this infinite regression question of where does this come from in the first place. That’s a large part of our discussion here: Epicurus is questioning, just like he questions where the universe came from, what is the foundation of virtue and what is it solid enough that you can build on it and be confident of your conclusion. If you’re just taking a poll of what people do in Rome versus Greece versus England versus Russia versus the United States, you’re going to come up with a pretty wide variety of things.
Don: People can also give the veneer of permanence and “getting the virtues from on high” by the mere fact of capitalizing the first letter of some of these — capital-V Virtue, capital-W Wisdom, capital-C Courage — and that can give the impression that there must be some proper noun, a real thing that’s being called “Courage,” and that sort of thing.
Don: I thought it was interesting that Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, says himself: “We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. This truth is attested by the experience of states. Lawgivers make the citizens good by training them in habits of right action. This is the aim of all legislation, and if it fails to do this it is a failure. This is what distinguishes a good form of constitution from a bad one.” And I think that there he’s saying it sort of goes round and round — it’s like, if you become just by doing just acts, well, who’s saying what acts are just? Where are you getting your definition of “just”? Where are you getting your definition of “temperate”? It comes back to: if you try and discuss these things in a vacuum and just talk about capital-V virtues, where are you getting your definitions? And I think that’s where Epicurus comes in handy, where he says that his idea of natural justice is “to neither harm nor be harmed.” If you use that as a definition, it’s like: okay, well, that at least is a concrete thing that you can observe. Whereas if you just say the state says that courage is this, it goes back to almost the whole 1984 thing, where the state has redefined the words and said what they’re going to mean.
Cassius: It’s that old problem, Don, of which came first — the chicken or the Platonic egg of the chicken?
Don: Exactly.
Cassius: It might be good at this moment to remind everybody that of course we’re about to have a discussion of a chapter entitled “The New Virtues,” and Epicurus does not discard the name of virtue — he does not discard the whole concept of virtue — but he ends up in a very different place. I think we could hit this even harder, and we probably should, because we should never miss an opportunity to distinguish Epicurus from the Stoics and from other adversarial groups. This is a huge, huge issue because when you hear Stoics talk about their techniques, they don’t hesitate from going all the way. They say virtue is its own reward, virtue is all you need, virtue is everything. And if you read these texts, you see how they double down on it, and how a modern Stoic can continue to hold to these positions without acknowledging that it’s ultimately a religious or faith-based position that is ultimately contingent on there being some god that created the prototype of it in the first place. Martha Nussbaum’s The Therapy of Desire is written from the Stoic perspective of how these virtues are going to help you, but in the end what people are reading that book for is they want to be happy and they’re looking for happiness. Well, virtue has to be grounded in happiness as the goal, or else it has no meaning of enduring form other than what the leaders of your particular society are doing at a particular time. It’s hard to believe that people find that kind of an argument compelling once they start thinking about it.
Joshua: There’s a thing, too — if you start thinking about stuff, then there’s your problem right there. It’s like just take it on faith.
Cassius: Interestingly enough, we’re going to have a section on faith here in this chapter in which DeWitt talks about Epicurus having a form of faith in the sense of confidence based on evidence. But there’s also this blind faith — the idea that you should have faith despite there being no evidence; you should have stronger faith because there is no evidence. Again, each one of these terms is something that you can go through and unwind the common definition of and put in a different framework. One more thing I can say in a general way is that taking, say, the emperor of Rome as your model — in the ancient world they had this practice which we now call the damnatio memoriae. This is an interesting problem: if you’re a Roman emperor and you are supposed to be something beyond merely mortal, and your laws are to carry divine decree, but the last guy to hold your position did everything wrong and didn’t behave at all like you think he should have behaved — then you would issue this damnatio memoriae. Every reference to his name would be scratched off every statue, off every monument, off every public building that he suborned. I thought of this because Don mentioned 1984 — it really becomes this issue of how virtue becomes very malleable in the hands of an authoritarian state.
Don: Yeah, absolutely. Justice is a prominent feature of the last ten Principal Doctrines of Epicurus, and he talks about it regularly. While we stay away from contemporary partisan politics, the background issue of what is justice is definitely something that was important to Epicurus and is important for us to think about, at least from a philosophical perspective.
Cassius: Going forward, just briefly — my eye was caught by one of DeWitt’s phrases that jumps out as being important. What DeWitt does is point out that if you’re not going to look at the leading citizens of Rome or Athens as your guide, what would Epicurus look to in order to determine what virtue might be? And DeWitt reminds us that Epicurus tells us: you look to the young of all kinds of animals to determine what they are doing before they become corrupted or perverted or warped by errors — which implies bad philosophy or bad religion. And DeWitt uses the phrase comparing it to Christianity, where of course the Christian would say that’s not going to help you because we’re all born with sin — original sin. What DeWitt says here is that Epicurus created by implication a doctrine of what may be called “original honesty.” He says: “To preserve this natural honesty became the main objective of the new education, and the virtue of honesty was raised to a status of prime importance.” The point being that what Epicurus was attempting to do — looking back at the way animals live before they are corrupted — is to use that as your base. You’re not going to conclude as a Christian might that we are born in sin. What you’re doing is just looking at them as they are, as best you can, objectively and honestly, and determining that what they do is pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
Joshua: I was going to say this is the “the emperor has no clothes” moment for Epicurus, because what he’s really saying by looking to nature not yet perverted — as the norm rather than to reason, to God, to the state, to anything like that — is he’s totally undercutting the philosophers, undercutting the priests, the oracles, all these entrenched groups that are normally the arbiters of what is good and proper and what is not. He’s totally stripping them of any power to set the tone in the conversation and restoring all of that power back to its rightful place, which is nature.
Don: I think it’s a good way to put it as well. It also seems to me to be focused back on the individual as opposed to the state.
Cassius: Yes, definitely. Now we’re still in the opening section, and DeWitt mentions this issue of faith and says that faith is a virtue with Epicurus. What DeWitt says is that it was the shift from skepticism to dogmatism that made a virtue of faith — dogmatism meant assertion of the possibility of knowledge, and Epicurus believed his teachings to be true. I’m not sure the right word there is “faith” as much as it is “confidence” or some other word. It’s one thing to make observations — that’s the important first step — but then there’s this question of coming to a conclusion based on the observation. Skepticism, to some extent, is a position that you can never come to a conclusion — you’re never going to be confident in making a prediction about something because you just have to experience it and see what happens. But Epicurus is definitely willing to go further than that. I wouldn’t call it “faith” because I can’t disassociate the word from “blind faith” — when I hear “faith” I hear “belief without evidence.” In the sense of “I have faith in Epicurus to give a good assessment” — that would mean I have confidence based on my reading of him in the past. You don’t know that the world is going to exist two seconds from now when you move your foot in a particular direction — it may just disappear — but you move your feet anyway because you have confidence that the world is not going to just disappear. You have confidence when you put on your brakes that your car is going to slow down. And you live your life based on confidence based on evidence. While you can use the word “faith” if you like, it’s a different concept than religious faith.
Don: Yeah, and I think DeWitt does a good job of defining dogmatism there. I like his “assertion of the possibility of knowledge” because I think a lot of people hear the word dogma and dogmatism and think that the Epicureans were dogmatic in the sense that they laid down the law and everybody had to believe exactly what they said. But I think the contrast with skepticism is the key: the Skeptic said you couldn’t and shouldn’t come to conclusions, whereas Epicurus said: no, we can assert knowledge after we have evidence for something, and we don’t have to go through our lives saying “I don’t know” to everything.
Cassius: Does anyone know — I’m maybe not reading it correctly — at the top of page 290 DeWitt says: “His utterances enjoyed the status of divine oracles and he provided his disciples authority.” And he goes on to say, “unluckily not 39 authorized doctrines.” I’ve never known what that means. Does anyone have a guess?
Joshua: Well, you know, the Anglican Church has its 39 Articles of Religion, finalized in 1571. I’m sure it comes from something like that. But I just have no idea — if the Anglican Church has 39, and of course DeWitt was a professor in Canada, and I kind of presume the Anglican Church is strong in Canada… maybe that’s the reference.
Cassius: That is exactly it, Joshua! Gold star for Joshua — yeah, finalizing 1571. I see no way that there could be anything else. That’s exactly right.
Joshua: I presume DeWitt judges it to be “unlucky” because it somehow restricts him from making another parallel to Christianity or something — he would like it to have been 39, because they’re literally called the 39 Articles. And that’s why he has the capital-A “Articles” in that line that follows.
Cassius: Your erudition never ceases to amaze me, Joshua. Nicely done. Here on page 290 DeWitt writes: “While the good Platonist like the Christian lived in contemplation of immortality, the Epicurean was taught to live in contemplation of mortality. The chance of achieving happiness was narrowly confined to the interval between birth and death. This had the effect of bestowing great urgency upon the business of living rightly. Procrastination became the greater folly.” So this is the urgency with which we are meant to approach this issue of the virtues and finding out the ground on which they stand — it becomes an incredibly important issue.
Joshua: That’s a good line to pull out. I fully agree. And that may be something DeWitt does not cover as he goes into detail of the particular virtues, because this is a general consideration. I agree too this is extremely important. I’ve always thought that this idea of the recognition that life is not a prelude to an eternity in heaven is one of the most profound positions you can take. It’s not a warm-up, it’s not a preparation, it’s not a dress rehearsal.
Cassius: Absolutely. This is it. All right, are we ready for some Wisdom now? “Let’s go” — wait, nicely done. There you go, exactly. We’re going to keep that in for sure.
Cassius: Let’s move to the next subsection, entitled “Wisdom” — capital W. DeWitt makes the point that in Plato’s version of things, wisdom is associated with the rational part of the soul, and its highest activity was the study of mathematics and in ethical and political investigations its instrument was dialectic — both of which Epicurus ends up de-emphasizing.
Don: This is totally irrelevant, but one thing I’ve noticed in the way that DeWitt writes this book — I’m thinking of people who talk about chakras and so forth, and they’ll say “this is the water chakra, it’s located at the sacrum, and it’s cleared by joy but closed by fear” or whatever. The way DeWitt writes it strikes me as kind of interesting: each virtue has the thing that identifies it, but also the thing that stands in the way of it.
Joshua: Yeah, there seems to be a lot of that, especially with Aristotle and also Philodemus — taking the virtue and then contrasting it with the corresponding vice, and how to get better at one and try to get rid of the other. It seems to be a common trope whenever people write this sort of thing.
Cassius: And then we get into this issue of Plato’s classification of men into gold, silver, and iron — what some call the “noble lie” of the Republic — and how Epicurus deals with that, and this issue of Epicurus calling Plato “the golden.” The central argument is that in the formation of a city or a state, Plato says we should tell people that by nature — by God, by natural right or whatever it is — people are classed into three different classes: you’ve got the golden people, who have the divine right to rule; then you’ve got the silver people, who are the aristocracy or the senators or whatever you would plug in there; and then you’ve got the iron people, who are at the bottom of the scale. And the reason that the iron people can never become kings is because they weren’t born golden. So that’s the issue: how does that relate to wisdom?
Joshua: Yeah, exactly — isn’t that a convenient categorization of people. I remember because I have a degree in history: one of the things we always talked about when we were talking about any pre-modern period is that you’ve got this tripartite struggle between three different groups — the king, the aristocracy, and the church — and it wasn’t really until you had the so-called fourth estate with urbanization that you could have any hope of breaking out of this medieval system. The nature of having three parts is that it will always require basically two of them in alliance to subdue the third, but then the third will always make an appeal to one of the other two to peel them off of the alliance — and that’s how you have this constant ongoing struggle for power and for land that really marks the structure of government in the Middle Ages.
Don: Moving down towards the end of that wisdom section, I think it’s important to bring up the whole idea of phronēsis — practical wisdom — as opposed to just capital-W Wisdom for its own sake. And I think that’s one of the things I like about the way DeWitt writes about it: he talks about phronēsis being sort of the basis of wisdom, and Epicurus himself talks about phronēsis and practical wisdom as sort of the beginning of all wisdom. And it makes sense because through practical wisdom you make your decisions about what you’re going to choose and what you’re going to reject and what paths you’re going to take, so phronēsis or practical wisdom is sort of the basis for all the other choices that you’re going to make.
Cassius: Yes — it’s almost like that is Epicurus’s answer to something we read way, way earlier in this book, which is the Platonic approach of pure reason contemplating absolute truth. It’s not pure reason and it’s not absolute truth. It’s practical reason, and it is nature and human life — that’s the focus.
Don: Exactly.
Cassius: We can quote DeWitt’s exact sentence on what Don was talking about. He says, quote: “In place of the grandiose notion of wisdom identifiable with pure reason and divinity and existing apart from mankind, Epicurus chose to exalt the practical reason, phronēsis, which was the greatest good in the beginning of all the other virtues.” So as we go through each of these virtues, wisdom is the first one. Let’s make sure we’re clear about what was the prior or incorrect view of wisdom, and then, instead of just jettisoning the idea of wisdom, what is the view that Epicurus came up with? One way to summarize it would be just what DeWitt says: Plato and Aristotle and the others were sort of deifying wisdom as if it existed in the air on its own, as if there was some reference point of wisdom somewhere outside of us that we should look to and emulate. And they romanticize this as being golden or reserved for people who are able to do it as being golden people. I recall from reading Ayn Rand years ago — she was very focused on being rational, a modern version of these people, almost like the Stoics, who consider rationality to be the distinguishing feature of being human, and therefore the development of rationality should be the key aspect of determining how to live. And no matter what perspective, old or new, you come from, this deification — making a god of reason — which I think the modern Stoics are also guilty of — is something that Epicurus absolutely rejected because there’s not a firm foundation for it. In place of this grandiose notion of wisdom, Epicurus was erecting a practical wisdom — prudence — a sort of practical ability to work with facts, work with evidence, work with observation, reasonably process them to produce the goal, which is a happy life.
Cassius: Okay, so let’s move to the next category, which always evokes in my mind pictures of 1920s women crusading against alcohol. Temperance is the word.
Joshua: What is it? The Women’s Christian Temperance Union or something? Yeah. I guess that’s the 1920s campaigning against alcohol.
Cassius: So I’m not even sure that “temperance” is the right word — it doesn’t really convey today exactly what this virtue probably is. How would you guys describe it in other words? It’s not exactly moderation, is it, or self-control?
Don: I think either of those get a better view of it. DeWitt does sometimes use some more Victorian-sounding terms, even though he wasn’t a Victorian — he uses that sort of older language sometimes, like “temperance” and that sort of thing. But yeah — self-control, moderation, that sort of thing, I think gets at what at least I would consider it to be. The word comes from the Latin temperare, which means “to restrain.” You’re restraining your desires or that sort of thing. And what DeWitt says here is that in Platonic philosophy, Plato relates this to his tripartite view of the soul — temperance in his philosophy concerns the appetitive part of the soul.
Joshua: Is DeWitt referring there to like the charioteer and the two horses — you have to control the horse of your desires and the horse of your reason, and get them to work together?
Cassius: That’s a good question. DeWitt includes the whole discussion of the natural and necessary desires under this heading. And this is also where we have to be careful about falling into the whole idea of Epicurus as an ascetic, limiting his desires to only enough to keep him barely alive. And that’s one of the things that Emily Austin did so well in her book — squashing that trope in the same way that she crushed the trope of Epicurus as a “hedonist” in sex, drugs, and rock and roll all the time. I really don’t want to get the idea across that they were talking about some sort of “middle way” — that’s a Buddhist or Aristotelian framing. So I think moderation and self-control are positive traits, but we have to be careful how we couch it in terms that aren’t borrowed from other philosophies.
Cassius: DeWitt says here on page 292: “This virtue of temperance is not even mentioned in the extant writings of Epicurus.” And then in very DeWittian style, he follows it up with: “Although he must have discussed it in the roll of both mentioned” — which we don’t have.
Don: There we go. Now I can get down on DeWitt again.
Cassius: Yes, Don is back to his golden mode. Okay. DeWitt then goes on to say: “Its Platonic context meant nothing to Epicurus for two reasons. First, he rejected that threefold tripartite division of the soul. Along with this, he rejected the subjection of the desires to the rational soul. And second, he looked not to reason but to nature as his norm.” That’s the consonant theme throughout this book: it’s nature, not reason, that really sets limits to desires. And then he goes on to say: “As for the political setting, Epicurus could not have destroyed it, even if he had wished, but he did diminish its importance by confining his teaching in Athens to private properties.” It’s less that political ambition that marks so much of the early thought of Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle was a lifelong mentor to Alexander the Great. It’s this issue of focusing on the individual and on the social aspects of it rather than the political or geopolitical aspects of it. Before we get to the natural and necessary classification under this heading, I’ve been constantly trying to refer to the Torquatus discussion in Book One of De Finibus because it’s interesting we just were laughing about how DeWitt says that Epicurus himself does not talk about temperance. But it’s interesting to see that Torquatus does specifically go on at some length about the topic of temperance, and probably just for the purpose of helping gel in our minds what it is that these guys were thinking temperance means. Let me read this Rackham version from Section 14 of De Finibus Book One. He’s just been discussing wisdom, and one thing before I read it — I have a hard time sometimes separating in my mind the difference between wisdom or prudence versus temperance. I mean, what’s the difference between prudence and this idea of self-control? Maybe this helps a little bit. He says: “The same principle will lead us to pronounce that temperance also is not desirable for its own sake, but because it bestows peace of mind and soothes the heart with a tranquilizing sense of harmony. For it is temperance that warns us to be guided by reason in what we desire and avoid. Nor is it enough to judge what is right to do or leave undone — we also need to abide by our judgment. Most men, however, lack tenacity of purpose. Their resolution weakens and succumbs as soon as the fair form of pleasure meets their gaze, and they surrender themselves prisoners to their passions, failing to foresee the inevitable result. Thus, for the sake of a pleasure at once small in amount and unnecessary — and one which they might have procured by other means or even denied themselves altogether without pain — they incur serious disease or loss of fortune or disgrace, and not infrequently become liable to the penalties of the law and of the courts of justice. Those, on the other hand, who are resolved to enjoy their pleasures so as to avoid all painful consequences thereof, and who retain their faculty of judgment and avoid being seduced by pleasure into courses they perceive to be wrong, reap the very highest pleasure by foregoing pleasure. Similarly also they often voluntarily endure pain to avoid incurring greater pain by not doing so. This clearly proves that intemperance is not undesirable for its own sake, while temperance is desirable not because it renounces pleasure but because it produces greater pleasure.”
Joshua: Yeah, I agree, though the phrase that ran through my head as you read a couple of those passages was: “I can resist anything but temptation.” And the whole idea of temperance is that you actually do resist temptation for things that are going to bring you pain. How is that different from the wisdom of knowing that you should resist temptation? Is there something about temperance that’s a quality of character that almost reminds me of some of our katastematic discussion — it seems like it’s an attitude as much as it is an action?
Don: Well, I guess you bring up a good point — are the virtues feelings? Are they emotions? Are they what? That’s how’s that for throwing a monkey wrench into the discussion here.
Cassius: Back where we started from — yeah, exactly! But thankfully Joshua will answer that question for us, right Joshua?
Joshua: It couldn’t be more patently obvious to me that virtue is simply instrumental behaviors that we pursue in a desire to get a fuller and more enjoyable and better sense of the good, and I don’t see why that’s unclear to anybody.
Cassius: Well done. Well spoken.
Joshua: Now the actual answer is — I don’t really know how to fully slice this in all the different ways that are necessary. Like Cassius said, trying to chart the intricate similarities between things like temperance and prudence and wisdom — I don’t really know where all that is meant to be demarcated. But I do think that in general the issue is pretty clear: the differences that Epicurus takes to the rest of these ancient philosophers is, I guess, the main point.
Cassius: Yeah, definitely. And before we move on, I’ll pick out one sentence of what Torquatus says: “Nor is it enough to judge what is right to do or leave undone — we also need to abide by our judgment.” So maybe prudence and wisdom to some extent is the reasoning process by which we know what it is we’re supposed to do. But as for me, I know I frequently look at the refrigerator and know what I should do, and yet I do not have the fortitude to abide by my judgment and actually carry it out. So maybe to some extent temperance is part of this attitude of actually carrying through on wisdom or prudence.
Don: That’s a very good point. That makes a lot of sense. This reminds me of the Vatican Saying — I’m forgetting which number it is — but it’s about compulsion: “Compulsion is an evil but there’s no compulsion to live under compulsion.” We just talked about that this last Wednesday night as part of the Vatican Sayings discussion that we have every week. And also what came to me is that temperance is sort of a feeling of you’re going to stop doing something, whereas prudence is something that you’re going to go forward and do — so it’s like a positive action, whereas temperance is a kind of negative stopping.
Cassius: Another thing that came up is “nature, not reason, is what sets the limits to desires.” I’m not sure if I caught that from what DeWitt said, but there’s a whole little thing to be explored there — it’s that issue of whether these ideas of the virtues, and where they come from: this is the classic argument in the country most of us live in about rights — where do rights come from? If your rights don’t come from God, then they come from government, is the argument that’s often made. It’s that same issue with the virtues: where did they come from? Do they come from the oracle at Delphi, the dictator at the head of the Athenian army, the priest, the philosopher? And the answer for Epicurus is: we learn them from nature.
Don: I think one of the things that you sort of touched on is that it seems to me at least that so many of the other philosophies and religions don’t trust nature — that nature is something not to be trusted, that we as humans can somehow supersede nature and see what’s beyond nature and apply our capital-R Reason to impose our will on nature, and that nature is something to be subjugated and not trusted. And I think that Epicurus takes the exact opposite view: we’re part of nature, we’re animals too, and so we need to look at animals and the young and figure out what it’s like to be uncorrupted by this veneer of civilization and indoctrination and education that we’ve imposed on ourselves, and see what we can actually do to find out what is the natural way to live.
Cassius: Yeah, no, I think that was very good, because that’s very much what we’re talking about — this whole issue of where does this stuff come from, and how can we be sure about it. I was thinking about this quote from Edward Abbey — I can’t remember which book this is in, actually; it might be in his journal or it might be in Desert Solitaire — anyway, he says: “To make the distinction unmistakably clear: civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life. Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the cardinal Bellarmino after 10 years of inquisition sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome.” This issue of how we connect nature to culture and nature to civilization is one I don’t have a good answer to. Epicurus says things like “set sail in your little boat and free from all indoctrination” — but yeah, I think as we go further we’ll see an answer partly to what Callistheni is bringing up: the need for society or for the state. The equivalent of that in Epicurean philosophy is this friendship situation. He extends the need of friendship and the support that you get from your friends in much the same way that we would extend the idea of a formal political organization of a state or a city. And it seems clear that he is stressing that you don’t live on your own in isolation. No man is an island — and you must have friends in order not only to live happily but also to live securely. All those things go hand in hand. And since I’m talking about Ayn Rand today, that’s really a huge difference: her individualism — “the virtue of selfishness” is the name of one of her books — this individualism taken to an extreme is not where Epicurus appears to be going. His focus is on pleasure, his focus is on happiness. Sometimes you do that as an individual, often you do that as part of a group of friends. It’s not focusing on the individual that is going to lead you to happiness — it’s focusing on happiness that leads you to happiness.
Don: Yeah, and I think that Epicurus’s participation — we’ve talked about before — his participation in the festivals and the life of the city — he was definitely a part of the city. But I think his emphasis on not getting involved in the politics and that sort of thing is one of the nuances of his relationship to the polis and the life of the city. He was definitely a part of it, but he didn’t feel the need to get into the dirtiness of politics to be a part of the life of the city.
Cassius: Yes. We’re now clearly moving into the next subsection on page 293, which is entitled “Courage.” Much of what’s just been said applies to this discussion as well. DeWitt says that in Plato’s psychology, courage goes with the passionate part of the soul, which should be ruled by the rational part. And to Aristotle, courage is a mean between feelings of fear and of overconfidence. But the focus is on the political setting. And the treatment given to it by Epicurus — DeWitt says Epicurus was no quietist or conscientious objector, and makes the reference to Epicurus submitting himself to the usual military training. I think we’ve kind of discussed that before. I wish I was more aware of something that clearly gave us a reference to that.
Joshua: I don’t know what the ancient source would be for that, but I think the general idea is that every male of a certain age had to do it, and so: is there any evidence that Epicurus was exempted from that requirement? And if not, do we just assume that he did it like everybody else? I think it says, quote: “Nor is there any instance on record where an Epicurean refused to bear arms because of his philosophy.” And that’s pretty well reason — because you would almost certainly see it. You have the example of Cassius Longinus, who was a general even after becoming an Epicurean. If you did have a pattern of the ancient Epicureans being conscientious objectors as a rule, you would have the same kind of reputation we today give to, say, the Quakers who refused to fight — like in Gary Cooper’s film, and there’s a recent movie, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge, which has Andrew Garfield in the main role playing a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector who goes to fight in World War II but refuses to carry a gun and becomes a combat medic instead. Sergeant York is the one I was trying to remember.
Don: I was looking through my notes whenever I had started to try and go through the Nicomachean Ethics — which I have not gotten back to — but I find Aristotle’s quote because I think we sometimes give more credit to Plato and Aristotle and think that when we talk about them they have these vaunted ideas. So in the section where Aristotle starts to talk about courage, he writes: “The courageous man then is he that endures or fears the right things, and for the right purpose, and in the right manner, and at the right time; and who shows confidence in a similar way. For the courageous man feels and acts as the circumstances merit and his principles may dictate.” And it seems to me that trying to define something by “enduring or fearing the right things, for the right purpose, in the right manner, at the right time” — it’s like: well, who decides which is the right manner, the right way, the right time? It just seems to go on and on. The sections I’ve read of Aristotle on these things, the way he describes them — it’s so wishy-washy and so contextual it just borders on almost meaningless. And I guess the more vague and generic that you talk, then you can say “oh yeah, well it applies in that case” and if you bring up another case, “oh yeah, it applies there too” — it just seems like a roundabout way of trying to describe and define these things.
Cassius: Let me see if it’s profitable here to look into ancient Greece’s oldest coward, if we could do that.
Joshua: Yes, this comes from the Iliad, and it’s a character called Thersites. Thersites was badly deformed — like a hunchback, his head came to a point — there’s a connection between deformity and moral ugliness in some of these old societies. I’m reading here from around line 225 in Book 2, and it says: “The Grecians with contempt listened and indignation while with voice at highest pitch he thus the monarch mocked.” This is Thersites speaking now: “What wouldst thou now? Whereof is thy complaint? Now, Agamemnon, thou hast filled thy tents with treasure, and the Grecians when they take a city choose the loveliest girls for thee. Is gold thy wish — more gold, a ransom brought by some chief Trojan for his son’s relief, whom I or other valiant Greeks may bind? Or wouldst thou yet a virgin, one by right another’s claim but made by force thine own? It was not well, great sir, that thou shouldst spring a plague on the Achaeans as of late. But come, my Grecian sisters — soldiers, named unfitly — off for war! Come, let us homeward, let him Agamemnon here digest what he shall gorge alone, that he may learn if our assistance profit him or not. For when he shamed Achilles he disgraced a chief far worthier than himself, whose prize he now withholds. But tush — Achilles lacks himself the spirit of a man! No gall hath he within him, or his hand long since had stopped that mouth that it should scoff no more.” And immediately they all shout him down like he’s the world’s biggest idiot — he’s a coward, he’s a fool. And the theory goes in modern scholarship that this is Homer piling his own opinion — his own apprehension about this misguided war — onto the worst character in the book, and then sort of driving him out of the story entirely so he doesn’t have to deal with it again. But this is sort of the exemplar of cowardice in Greek culture making some very excellent points.
Cassius: Part of the point being, Joshua, that even though it’s deemed so courageous and bold to be at war, the real result of Agamemnon’s actions in attempting to extend his conquest so far is basically the destruction of Greece itself. Bear in mind the Iliad doesn’t start at the beginning of the war — it starts in the middle of the tenth year of the war. So they have been at war with Troy for ten years, and Thersites’s argument here is: we’re here with Agamemnon, he wants more gold, he wants more women, he wants more power, more riches, more fame. But what does that do for literally any of the rest of us? We have homes, we have farms, we have wives and children back home in Greece. Why are we not allowed, after ten years of war getting nowhere, to go back home?
Joshua: He sounds practical to me. Isn’t there — was it Croesus? Croesus was the king who ended up launching a war himself and went to the oracle and asked what was going to happen. And the oracle said: “A great power will be destroyed.” And in the end he loses the war, and the joke is that the oracle was right — a great power was destroyed, but it was not his enemy. It was Croesus himself.
Cassius: You’re right. In fact, Lucian in Alexander the Oracle Monger compares one of Alexander the False Prophet’s oracles to that one. Alexander had told Marcus Aurelius the emperor of Rome that he was going to win a great victory and all they had to do was throw two lions into the river as a sacrifice. So they throw the two lions into the river, the lions swim to the other bank — and the enemy beat them to death with clubs, and then did the same to the Romans. So our point is that courage can be foolhardiness, or can lead to very negative results, if it’s not properly employed.
Joshua: Exactly. And I think holding capital-C Courage up as some thing where everybody has to do something specific — even Aristotle himself talked about how contextual it is, that it all depends on what the circumstances are — it’s one of those things where if you try and hold these virtues up in and of themselves as some sort of ideal, it’s like: well, what does that even mean? And I think that people try to make you feel you’re doing something wrong if you even question that sort of idea. “Well, how dare you question the virtue of courage!” Well: what do you mean by the virtue of courage? What does that actually mean?
Cassius: DeWitt has a lot of good information here in this relatively short section on courage. Let’s plan to wrap this section up as the end of our podcast today. At the bottom of page 293, DeWitt relates that Epicurus had said that “nothing terrible can happen to one while living who has thoroughly grasped the truth that there is nothing terrible in not living,” and DeWitt relates that to one of the Principal Doctrines: “The same argument that assures us of nothing terrible lasting forever or even very long discerns the protection afforded by friendship in this brief life of ours as being the most dependable of all.” And at the top of page 294 there’s a statement quoted: “Courage comes not by nature but by a calculation of advantage” — which DeWitt says is sort of a secondhand report of something Epicurus said. We need to look up where that comes from before we put too much stock in it. But the bottom line of a lot of this is that as with everything else, we’re looking at the ultimate result of a particular action and judging whether something is courageous or not by the ultimate result of it — as opposed to just some abstract notion that we should always be courageous. We instead determine whether being courageous in a particular situation is going to lead to the result we’re hoping to have, because if it doesn’t, it would be foolhardy to pursue it. The closing paragraph here is: “Epicurus, while leaving undisturbed the concept of courage as a virtue of the citizen and the soldier, transfers the responsibility for developing it from the state and from the laws to the individual himself, and shifts the emphasis from the sphere of politics to that of morals.” And it may be added also that what we call moral courage will appear in a following section as an aspect of honesty. We’ll deal with that probably next week. So let’s bring today’s thoughts to a conclusion and go around the table and see if we have any additional thoughts on virtue in general, or the virtues that we’ve covered today — wisdom, temperance, and courage. Martin, any thoughts?
Martin: No, I’m sorry — I have nothing to add.
Cassius: Okay. Callistheni?
Callistheni: Yes. This is very interesting, discussing the virtues, and I think it’s a good place to try to bring in some practical applications of Epicureanism. So it’s something to think about — how our understanding of virtues affects us.
Cassius: Yeah, we all agree that Epicurus was all about putting what we know from philosophy into practical action in our lives. And I think seeing these things — even though we’re talking about war and Hellenistic civilization and education and stuff that might seem distant — all of these have practical applications to how we live our lives today, and it’s one of those things that we try to bring to the fore in the forum. Yes, Callistheni — I know your interest goes especially to therapeutics and different techniques for living more happily. And even though the title of this chapter has the word “virtue” in it, which doesn’t seem so practical, I really think that when you back up and realize that the big controversy here is that the Stoics say virtue is an end in itself, but Epicurus says that virtue is a tool for the achievement of happiness — when you think about the word “tool,” these are the categories in which Epicurus himself is making whatever therapeutic or other suggestions he’s making to people. So while these titles may seem Victorian in the way we’re talking about them — because we’re placing them in context of Plato and Aristotle — what we’re really talking about here are the techniques that you should cultivate in your normal daily life for the achievement of happy living. Don?
Don: Yeah, I think this is a really interesting discussion to have. And while you mentioned that DeWitt sometimes has odd wording, I think it’s good that he brings up these individual virtues that we can think about. I keep coming back in this discussion to the idea that we don’t want to see the virtues as capital-V Virtues or capital-W Wisdom — we want to think of them as practical applications of our daily lives and living the most pleasurable life that we can. As the Principal Doctrine says, you can’t live pleasurably without living virtuously, and you can’t live virtuously without living happily.
Joshua: Yeah, those are all very good points. And you know, when I was in college I went to Rome one summer and we were in the Roman Forum, or what’s left of it. The tour guide pointed to an unremarkable hole in the ground and said: “This is the lacus Curtius.” The story goes — I think it’s reported in Livy — that in ancient Rome a chasm opened up in the Roman Forum and it continued to widen and expand. They asked the oracle what to do to close the chasm, and the oracle said: “Throw the most precious thing you have into the chasm and that will close it.” So people are bringing their jewels, their gold and silver and ivory and all this precious material and throwing it into the chasm — and the chasm is just getting wider and wider. Finally a young Roman man on a horse says: “Romans, you’ve lost sight of the main point — the most precious thing Rome has is brave men.” And on his horse and in a full suit of armor he goes riding off into the chasm, which then closes. I mention that because Cicero says somewhere: “I believe the souls of men are immortal, and I would not have this belief taken from me while I was still alive.” This whole issue of how we confront the certainty of our own mortality — and the idea which Epicurus insists is certain: that there’s nothing beyond that — there’s an element of courage required to confront that and still live well. That to me seems to be an important point on the issue of courage specifically, and on the virtues in general.
Cassius: Good points, Joshua. Let me close this episode today by quoting back from Torquatus again, in Book One of De Finibus: “Those who place the chief good in virtue alone are beguiled by the glamour of a name and do not understand the true demands of nature. If they will consent to listen to Epicurus, they will be delivered from the grossest error. Your school dilates on the transcendent beauty of the virtues, but were they not productive of pleasure, who would deem them either praiseworthy or desirable? We esteem the art of medicine not for its interest as a science, but for its conducive to health. The art of navigation is commended for its practical and not its scientific value, because it conveys the rules for sailing a ship with success. So also wisdom must be considered the art of living — if it affected no result it would not be desired, but as it is it is desired because it is the artificer that procures and produces pleasure.” Okay, that’s the first of our episodes on “The New Virtues.” We’ll come back in a week and we will start with justice. Thanks for your time today. Please drop by the forum and let us know if you have any comments or questions, and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much.